Library News

Hurricane Katrina and the Library's Collections

During Hurricane Katrina the basement of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library—an area about the size of a football field—was flooded by about eight feet of water. The basement housed a music library and very large collections of government documents, newspapers, and microforms. Jones Hall across the parking lot houses the library's Special Collections. Its basement was flooded with about four feet of water.

All was not lost, however.

As part of the university's campus-wide emergency plan, Belfor, an international disaster management company, responded to the scene almost immediately with a battery of huge generators and specialized equipment, and in both buildings installed an elaborate series of giant tubes to pump dry air throughout each floor in danger. Water was quickly removed and a battle against humidity and mold very quickly begun.

In the process, we were able to salvage from the basement of the Howard-Tilton building all 10,000 or so items from a "protected storage" area that housed a large number of important books in art and photography—many catalogues raisonnes —and a cataloging backlog of several thousand other printed works.

In the Maxwell Music Library roughly 70 percent of our printed books and scores was salvaged for restoration. The music library held about 43,000 titles including books, scores, journals, CDs, LPs, and more. In general, the salvage operation was focused on our print materials, which had less chance of eventual replacement and, it turns out, a better chance for restoration.

In Government Documents about 10 percent of the collection was salvaged, a selected portion of print materials thought to be difficult to replace. This was a large collection with well over 150,000 titles, most of it trapped in compact storage units no longer functional that had to be ripped apart to get at the soupy material inside.

In the Microforms area we were able to salvage less than five percent because of the damage that immersion in water can do to film and because many of this collection's 25,000 or so titles eventually could be replaced. Complicating matters was that the large number of film cabinets in this area still held a lot of water and moisture after most of the basement water had been pumped out. To help save the building overall, they simply had to be dredged.

In the Jones Hall basement an effort was made to retrieve everything of value, more than 4,000 boxes of material overall. Damaged were manuscripts that included the personal papers of several local figures and the records of a local bank.

The numbers here are very preliminary, and we may not know until the end of the recovery process the actual percentage of materials restored from those salvaged.

All the salvaged material is now frozen for transfer to Belfor's restoration facility in Ft. Worth, TX. The library will very likely seek to restore as much as possible from what was salvaged and to replace the rest. We have begun initial discussions with the university's insurers toward this end. We have also been working with a number of libraries and publishers to plan for targeted donations to help with our rebuilding efforts.

In summary, much was lost but at this stage it looks like the library may be able to restore more from these basement collections than it initially appeared in those dreadful first few days and weeks immediately after the hurricane. Remarkable work was and is still being done in this, and while there have been major losses the rapid response and salvage effort were examples of great professionalism and expertise, at a time when it appeared erroneously from media reports that nothing like this could be found in New Orleans in the wake of the storm. (See photos.)

In those initial days after Katrina, both our buildings-especially the large Howard-Tilton main library-became ticking time bombs for our collections. Their deep basement lakes produced incredible amounts of rapidly growing humidity while the loss of power shut off any circulating air. Being mid-summer in New Orleans at the time, the interior temperature in these closed-off structures quickly began to climb dangerously. Mold is toxic to library collections and this was the worst-case scenario for a library disaster of historic proportion.

Today, the upper floors and the collections on them in both of our library buildings are fine, and mold was miraculously kept away from them. Work was undertaken during November and December to remove the basement electrical, HVAC, and network systems that were destroyed. The main Howard-Tilton building will creatively run off temporary power and HVAC systems for some time to come, but these buildings are open and operating for the spring 2006 semester.

Andy Corrigan
Associate Dean for Library Collections